In a post I will be publishing shortly after this one, I wrote an Azure Automation Runbook to automatically restart an Azure Web App when Azure Application Insights reports the site as being offline. The solution is not foolproof, but it offers a good first line of defence against issues that bring the site down. I originally wrote the runbook some time ago, however, with pressure elsewhere, it has been a while since I have been able to re-visit it and complete it.

Whilst testing the workflow this morning, I found that it was generating an error at the Login-AzureRmAccount stage; the stage where the workflow should be logging into Azure using a service principal to obtain permissions on the relevant Resource Groups. A screenshot of the error log from the automation job is shown below.

Updating the Azure PowerShell Module in Azure Automation is painless and can be performed from the Modules blade in the Azure Automation account.

After a short wait, the modules are updated to the latest version. Re-running my workflow in Azure Automation completed successfully proving the issue as being an out-of-date module version.

An interesting point is that there is currently a banner message in Azure Automation warning that Azure PowerShell modules will be automatically updated in Azure after the 17th July 2017. The screenshot below illustrates the message in Azure Automation. I think this is a very good move by Microsoft. As an author of automation, my workflow and runbook should not be beholden to the version of the module. If a new module is required to allow my code to continue to function, do the update automatically. If features are being deprecated in the Azure PowerShell modules, I hope that Microsoft will notify us in advance. This will give us all time to revise our code to work on any deprecated commands.

Office 365 co-existence with volume licensed products is something which has been a bone of contention for many Office 365 users. Traditionally, an enterprise, we have installed Office 2016 ProPlus using a Windows Installer package. The license for this would have come from your Enterprise Agreement (EA) and would typically be licensed using a KMS host. When you move to Office 365, this model changes. These changes can have a major impact on Project and Visio applications for some customers.

To read out what the changes are and how we can work with them, read on below the fold.

A normal HPKP implementation would see you configure your website to pin your own public certificate. Whilst I would advise against it because you have no ownership or control over the certificates, it would be entirely possible to pin the Microsoft Azure Websites certificates using HPKP to your site. The email from Microsoft this morning was an advisory that Microsoft is changing the certificate it uses.

If you are unsure if you are using HPKP or if you are unsure of which public keys you have pinned, I would suggest you use the Qualys SSL Test site as this will report the certificates in use with HPKP and whether it is enabled.

Deflate and GZip compression have been with us on the web for many years. They do a decent job but as times move on, so do compression algorithms. This is something I have talked about before using services like TinyPNG to squeeze the spare bytes out of your images to reduce page load times but this only applies to images obviously.

Brotli is a Google project for a newer, more modern compression algorithm for the web. According to the claims of Google, using Brotli over GZip not only increases the content compression reducing page size but also reduces CPU usage in the decompression process too. With the ever expanding usage of mobile devices, both of these are great things to have.

If you are interested in reducing your page size to improve load times and reduce your outbound bandwidth on your site then read on to learn now. I will cover the requirements, fallback compatibility and also how to get Brotli for Linux and Windows as well as the main point, how to enable it for an Azure Web App.

Today is the day that ClearDB users rejoice. Today is the day that a viable platform as a service offering for both MySQL and PostgreSQL exist in Microsoft Azure. Announced last night, Microsoft have now launched their own platform as a service offerings for the two database engines.

For years, ClearDB have offered a PaaS solution for MySQL. I had the misfortune of trying it out first hand recently on a web project and I can tell you that the performance was shocking. So bad was the performance that we actually deployed a Linux VM in Azure to run the MySQL service in IaaS and take the management hit on IaaS vs. PaaS. Even the support offered was terrible, blaming the performance on Azure itself when there were no issues with the Azure platform globally at the time.

The announcement puts these new services in preview. This means that the services and features aren’t going to be ready for your production workloads nor are all of the features going to be available right now. For example, I deployed an Azure Database for MySQL server last night to try it out and the Basic pricing tier is the only tier available right now. The ability to force all connections to secure and to define firewall rules for access is important and good to see there from day one.

All in all, it looks like a good first release. As I have been using In App MySQL database for Azure Web Apps to run the MySQL database on this site for sometime now (since preview in fact), and I have been debating whether to step back to IaaS for MySQL because of the fact that In App MySQL limits my ability to use features like Azure Load Balancer or Azure Traffic Manager with multiple site instances, this is going to be something I can definately see me using in the near term for real.

This is going to be a really quick post but one I thought may be worth sharing. Imagine that you are working in the Azure Portal and you are trying to update a Virtual Machine configuration to detach an existing data disk on the VM. You’ve done everything right following the steps at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/detach-disk by stopping the VM and waiting for it to fully stop.

For normal users, this wouldn’t be an issue however if you are like me and you care for your eyes and have switched to the dark theme in the Azure Portal, you are in for a problem. When you select Edit on the disk configuration of the VM, you notice that the Detach button that the Microsoft article refers to is missing as shown below.

The Detach button should be visible just to the right of the Host Caching drop-down menu but as you can see, it is not.

It turns out, this is a bug in the Azure Portal when using the dark theme and I have reported this already. If you switch to one of the other theme colours, the button magically appears.

The problem is that the buttons are meant to change when you select the dark theme. If you look at the Save and Discard buttons at the top of the screenshot, you can see that in the dark theme, these two buttons are white to constant with the dark background and when using the white theme, these buttons are black to contrast with the background. The Detach button at the moment, doesn’t appear to be properly changing between white and black to cater for the background colour in use.

In previous posts, I’ve talked about implementing web security features such as HTTPS, CSP, HPKP and HSTS. Almost all of these are things we can configure ourselves within our web applications responses to client requests however one of these features, HSTS requires a little more work to fully implement.

HSTS is a technology of two halves. HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a feature which allows a website to instruct the client that it should never be downgraded to HTTP and should only ever request and receive data from the site over HTTPS. We can easily implement this, in the case of Windows and IIS, using a web.config file outbound rewrite rule which I covered in the previous post, Working Hard on Web Security.

The trouble is, this is only half the battle. If a client repeatedly visits your site, their browser will know as a result of previous visits to always use HTTPS due to having previously seen the HSTS header but what about new visitors? What happens if your site is victim of a downgrade attack between you implementing HTTPS and HSTS and the first time a user visits? Their browser doesn’t know it should be using HSTS already so we have a problem.

In case you haven’t gathered from previous posts, I’m quite into Z-Wave and Home Automation right now. Our existing wireless doorbell gave up the ghost a little while ago and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to get a Z-Wave doorbell so that I could integrate it into some areas of the house instead of just a dumb chime unit nowhere near the living areas where we stand a chance of hearing it.

I used the article Do You Sell a Z-Wave Doorbell over at my favourite Z-Wave UK reseller, Vesternet for a little inspiration but since the article was written things have moved on a little.

If you have a wired doorbell running on mains voltage then this is actually a bit easier to accomplish as you can use the Fibaro Binary Sensor however I don’t have an existing wired doorbell as there is no wiring to support one so it’s wireless all the way. Since speaking to Vesternet about the project originally, Fibaro have released the new Universal Door and Windows Sensor which is a Generation 5 Z-Wave device meaning longer range and improved battery life so this is obviously the device I purchased for the project. It also has some differences from the previous model.

Follow me beyond the fold for the what parts I used and how I bond them all together.

This week, I’ve been studying some topics ahead of my 70-533 exam and one of the topics that I covered which I though would make a really relevant and hopefully not too long of a post would be the subject of restricting Azure resource deployment to specific regions.

Many organisations have considerations around data privacy and sovereignty. For me and many folks in the UK, right now that means your data is probably living in an Azure region in Europe. Either Dublin or Amsterdam. With the UK datacentres being brought online fairly recently and the available features growing month by month, it makes using those regions more appealing. With the prospect of Brexit and how your data soverignty may be effected by that shake up could potentially make those UK datacentres even more appealing in the months and years to come.

With an out of the box Azure subscription, we have the power to deploy resources to any region we like be it UK, US, South America or Asia but with these privacy and data protection concerns wouldn’t it be great if you could limit this so that even the most well trained administrators and users cannot accidently place your data on the wrong side of a pond?

Read on below the fold and I’ll explain how to create an Azure Resource Policy and how to apply that to your evironments.

This is a really quick post but one I thought was worthy of getting down somewhere.

I’m starting to use GitHub more and more as a source for content and as I find myself wanting to produce the odd piece of content as well, I figured GitHub is where everyone else is sticking their Azure Resource Manager code so I should do the same.

For anyone that has looked on the official Azure team GitHub Repositories, you will have seen the blue Deploy to Azure button which is really nice as it directly takes you from GitHub over to Azure and links back to the GitHub Repository to start deploying the Resource Manager template without you having to download it and deploy it manually first.

About Richard J Green

Richard Green

Richard works as a Cloud Consultant for Fordway Solution where his primary focus is to help customers understand, adopt and develop with Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and System Center.

Richard Green is an IT Pro with over 15 years' of experience in all things Microsoft including System Center and Office 365. He has previously worked as a System Center consultant and as an internal solutions architect across many verticals.

Outside of work, he loves motorbikes and is part of the orange army, marshaling for NGRRC, British Superbikes and MotoGP. He is also an Assistant Cub Scout Leader.